She'd succeeded in distracting her daughter, anyhow. "What does diligent mean?"

"It means he takes care of everything that needs taking care of."

"Oh." Francesca spread her hands, a gesture of pure frustration. "Well, whatis wrong with Alicia, then?"

"I don't know. Whatever it is, she'll probably get over it pretty soon," Lise said.She'd better get over it pretty soon. If she doesn't, more people than Francesca will notice. No doubt her own parents had had the same worries, the same fears, over her. And no doubt they'd had good reason to.

Roxane bustled into the kitchen. She greeted Francesca: "Oh, there you are. What are you doing?"

"Talking with Mommy." Francesca looked down her nose at her little sister.

"What are you talking about?" Roxane wouldn't have recognized a snub if it bit her in the ankle.

"What a nuisance you are," Francesca said.

"We were not!" Lise said. "You apologize this instant."

"Sorry." Francesca sounded anything but.

"Well, whatwere you talking about, then?" Roxane persisted.

"About Alicia," Francesca said reluctantly.

"Oh." Roxane nodded. Her hair, even curlier than Alicia's, bounced up and down. "She's been peculiar lately, all right." She fixed Francesca with a baleful stare. "Aber naturlich,you're pretty peculiar yourself."

"Roxane, you stop that, too." Not for the first time, Lise Gimpel had the feeling of being in no-man's-land between forces that were going to keep sniping at each other no matter what she did. Sometimes the squabbles among her children were three-sided, which only made her feel completely surrounded. She did her best to sound severe: "Now you say you're sorry."

"Sorry." Roxane outdid Francesca in insincerity. Then, happily, she went back to talking about Alicia, who wasn't there to defend herself: "She's been reading those funny Jew books again, and just a little while ago she was talking about how they were still in her room even though they're too easy for her."

Those funny Jew books. Streicher's poison had a candy coating that had made it seem tasty to German children for almost eighty years. Lise remembered thinking the same thing about his books before finding out what she was. Carefully, she said, "Sometimes you most want to look back at something just when you're getting too big for it."

To her relief, Francesca nodded in agreement to that. "I think the kindergarten rooms are a lot cuter now than I did when I was in them."

"They aren't cute," said Roxane, who was in kindergarten now. "They're just…schoolrooms." She laced the word with scorn.

"But they have all those tiny little desks and chairs and things," Francesca said. "They're sosweet." She was the sentimental one in the family, another way she took after Lise. Roxane made a horrible face. Francesca made one back at her-she wasn't too sentimental for that.

"Cut it out, both of you," Lise said. "You're behaving like a couple of Hottentots." She had no idea how Hottentots behaved, or even if the Reich had left any of them alive, but she liked the sound of the name.

Instead of cutting it out, Francesca and Roxane egged each other on. That gave Lise the excuse to shoo them out of the kitchen. If they wanted to drive each other crazy somewhere else, she didn't mind. If they were driving each other crazy, they weren't wondering why Alicia was acting strange.

Lise hoped they weren't, anyway. She also hoped no one outside the family had noticed anything out of the ordinary. Alicia was a bright child and, more than either of her sisters, a solitary child. That ought to make any odd behavior from her stand out less and be more likely to get forgiven. It ought to. Lise hoped it would.

She wondered if there was any point to praying it would. Did God listen to a Jew's prayers these days? If He did, why had He let the Nazis do what they'd done?What did we do-what could we have done-to deserve that?The question had haunted Lise ever since she learned she was a Jew. She'd never come close to finding an answer that satisfied her.

And how long till Alicia asked the same thing? Not very, not if Lise was any judge. Alicia was too clever-too clever by half-not to wonder about that. There were times when Lise wished her eldest daughter were a little less clever, or at least had a little more in the way of sense to go with her precocious intelligence. She laughed.As well wish for the moon while I'm at it.

She went back to getting supper ready.And then, in a couple of years, we'll have to tell Francesca, and after that Roxane. How long can we hope to get away with it? How long can we keep being what we are? She was chopping an onion. She told herself the tears in her eyes came from that. Maybe she was right. Maybe.

Heinrich Gimpel poked a button on the remote control. The televisor in the living room came to life. It was seven o'clock, time for the evening news. The news reader, Horst Witzleben, looked like a cross between an SS man and a film star. "Come on, Lise," Heinrich called. "Let's see what's gone on today."

"I'll be there in a second," she answered from the kitchen. "Dishes are nearly done. Turn up the sound so I can hear it."

"All right." He did.

That made Witzleben's booming greeting-"Good day,Volk of the Greater German Reich "-sound even more impressive than it would have otherwise. He owned an almost operatic baritone. Heinrich wouldn't have been surprised if technicians in the studio pumped it up electronically to make it sound more impressive, more believable, still. The Ministry of Propaganda didn't miss a trick. "And now the news."

And now what they want people to hear,Heinrich thought. He had excellent good reasons not to rely completely on the Propaganda Ministry's trained seal. It wasn't just that he was a Jew and the Nazis had been thundering lies about his kind since before they came to power. He also worked in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht; things he found out about professionally sometimes showed up on the news. When they did, they were often distorted past recognition.

Ordinary people, though-butchers, bakers, candlestick makers,goyim -had no way to know that, no reason to believe it. As far as they were concerned, Witzleben might have been spouting Holy Writ.I heard it from Horst was a synonym for You can take it to the bank. Heinrich had a sneaking suspicion the Ministry of Propaganda had set out to make it one.

"Our beloved Leader, Kurt Haldweim, is reported to be resting comfortably in the Fuhrer 's palace, recovering from what his physicians describe as a stubborn cold," Horst Witzleben intoned. "Routine matters proceed normally. Should anything extraordinary arise, the Fuhrer is fully capable of attending to it on the instant."

The picture of the Fuhrer on the screen behind Witzleben had to be at least fifteen years old. Like Hitler himself, Kurt Haldweim had been born in the Ostmark when it was still Austria, and separate from Germany. He'd been a young officer in the Second World War. He was perhaps the last of that generation still in the saddle-if hewas still in the saddle. Over the past few years, he'd had a long series of "stubborn colds" and "minor illnesses" that kept him out of the public eye for weeks at a time. Everything went on in his name. How much that meant…was not the sort of thing Horst Witzleben discussed on the air.

Even working where he did, Heinrich didn't know the full answer there. Along with everyone else in the Germanic Empire, he could only wait and see if the Fuhrer rallied, as he had several times before.

Lise came in then. Heinrich turned down the sound and slipped an arm around her as she sat down on the sofa beside him. She rested her head on his shoulder. "You didn't miss a thing," he told her. "Horst was just going on about the Fuhrer 's 'cold.'" He put a certain ironic twist on the word.

"He says everything with Haldweim is fine, then?" Lise asked. Heinrich nodded. She sighed. "And one of these days before too long he'll be dead-but he'll still be fine."